Drunken Sailor

The story

"Drunken Sailor", also known as "What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor?" or "Up She Rises", is a traditional sea shanty, number 322 in the Roud Folk Song Index. Who made it and where is not known. It resembles the traditional Irish song "Óró sé do bheatha abhaile" in its chord progression and in its repeated words over melodic sequences, and it is in the Dorian mode. Its words vary, but nearly always ask in some form what shall be done with a drunken sailor early in the morning. In some styles each verse proposes a way to sober or punish him; in others further questions are asked and answered about other people.

It was sung to work that needed a brisk walking pace. It is believed to come from the early 19th century or before, when ships' crews, above all on warships, were large enough to haul on a rope simply by marching along the deck; with the smaller crews of merchant packet ships and clippers, which worked in other ways, it seems to have fallen out of use or moved to minor tasks. The first published description comes from an account of an 1839 whaling voyage out of New London, Connecticut, to the Pacific Ocean, which gives it as a song "performed with very good effect when there is a long line of men hauling together". It may be older: in Minstrelsy of Maine (1927) the collectors Eckstorm and Smyth note that the grandmother of one of them, who sang it, said she had heard it used for tacking on the Penobscot River. References are rare all the same: a work of fiction of 1855 has a drunken female cook sing it, and the third edition of Davis and Tozer's collection Sailor Songs or 'Chanties' printed five verses, but no other major shanty collection of the 19th century included it.

John Masefield, printing it in 1906, called it a "bastard variety" of shanty that was "seldom used", a "runaway chorus" sung in quick time; others called the kind "stamp and go" or "walk away" shanties. W. B. Whall, a veteran English sailor of the 1860s and 1870s, wrote that it was one of only two shanties sung in the Royal Navy, where singing at work was generally frowned upon. Later sailors remembered it at other tasks. Richard Maitland, an American sailor of the 1870s, sang it for the collector Alan Lomax in 1939 and explained that men sang it while walking away with the slack of a rope when an iron ship, after a year at sea, was scrubbed of the barnacles and grass on her bottom in the calm horse latitudes. Frederick Pease Harlow wrote that it served for hauling a halyard hand over hand to hoist the lighter sails, and Richard Runciman Terry added the windlass and the capstan. Percy Grainger recorded Charles Rosher of London singing it in 1906, and James Madison Carpenter recorded several old sailors singing it in the 1920s and 1930s.

On land it became a popular song. By the 1900s it was sung as a glee at Eton College, and by the 1910s at gatherings of the Savage Club in London. In the American Midwest a catalogue of folk songs of 1915 listed it as sung while dancing "a sort of reel", and the old-time fiddler John Baltzell recorded a "Drunken Sailor Medley" among his reels around 1923. Percy Grainger worked it into his "Scotch Strathspey and Reel" (1924) and Malcolm Arnold used its melody in his Three Shanties for Woodwind Quintet (1943). The shanty collections published from the 1920s fed a revival of shanty singing for entertainment; Terry's collection was the evident source of the Robert Shaw Chorale's version of 1961. Fred Kaan's Lent and Easter hymn "We Have a King Who Rides a Donkey" is sung to the same tune.

It grew into one of the best-known shanties among audiences who had never been to sea. It has been recorded by The King's Singers, Pete Seeger, The Irish Rovers, Nathan Evans and many others. The Irish Rovers have closed their shows with it for over 50 years, and after their recordings went viral on YouTube they released an album named Drunken Sailor in 2012. A disco version by Gina, Dale Haze and the Champions reached the Irish top 20 in 1981. It is sung in the films The Truman Show (1998) and Fisherman's Friends (2019).

What it says

A work song built on one question, asked again and again over a brisk marching tune: what shall the crew do with a drunken sailor early in the morning? Each verse gives a rough, comic answer, a cure to sober him or a punishment, and the chorus "up she rises" kept the men hauling in step. The mood is boisterous and mocking.

The words